in the religious organizations. You must not seek for it in representative and organized systems which undertake to hold its essence. The Church as a mile-stone shows how far morals have travelled up to that moment. The moment it is found, it is useless. It is like the bulwarks of Holland, good when the waters are outside, but all the worse, when the waters are inside, to keep them in.

The pioneer goes through the forest girdling the trees as he moves, and, five years after, these trees are dead lumber. So Christianity goes through society, dooming now this institution and now that custom as sinful. Soon they die. Look back forty years. Christianity branded slavery as sin. Wealth laughed scornfully at the fanaticism. Fashion swept haughtily past in her pride. The State thought to smother the protest by statutes. The Church clasped hands and blessed the plot. But a printer's boy yielded himself to the sublime inspiration, gave life to the martyrdom of the message; and when his hand struck off three million of fetters, the Church said, "Yes, I did it, for did I not always say There was no bond in Christ Jesus.'" Yes, you did. But when to take that terrible protest from your treasure-house and flare it in the face of an angry nation, was grave peril and cruel sacrifice, you hid it! You always had the truth; your only lack was life to believe, and courage to apply it. The question that lies beyond, and has for thirty years, is the question of race. We lifted races up to a dead level, and the Church said, "Did n't I tell you God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth?" And we all said: "Yes, you did. The trouble was that when it was crucifixion to apply it, you could not see it."

6

The thing that lies beyond is sex. Will you crush woman out of her opportunities? The Church says, "Yes." But the age travels on, and by and by she will

take her place side by side with man in politics, as she does in society, and then the Church will say, " Did n't I tell you so? There is neither male nor female in Christ." Then we shall say: "Yes, you did; but when it was vulgar and unpopular and isolated to apply it, you were not there." And beyond that lies the darkened chamber of labor that only rises to toil and lies down to rest. It is lifted by no hope, mellowed by no comfort; looks into gardens it created, and up to wealth which it has garnered, and has no pleasure thence; looks down into its cradle, there is no hope and Stuart Mill says to the Church, "Come and claim for labor its great share in civilization and its products;" the bench of bishops says, "Let us have a charity-school;" Episcopacy says, "We will print a primer;" the dissenting interest says, "We will have cheap soup-houses; " Lord Shaftesbury says, "We will have May-day pastimes;" and gaunt labor says, "I don't ask pity, I ask for justice. In the name of the Christian brotherhood I ask for justice." And the Church quietly hides itself behind its prayer-book, and the great vital force underneath bears us onward, till by and by through the ballot, by the power of selfish interest, by the combination of necessity, labor will clutch its rights, and the Church will say, "So I did it!"

You have no right to luxuriate. If you are Christian men, you should sell your sword and garments, go into your neighbor's house and start a public opinion, and rouse and educate the masses. One soul with an idea outweighs ninety-nine men moved only by interests. Though there are powerful obstacles in our pathway, they will be permeated by the idea we advocate, as was Caesar's palace by the weeds nurtured by an Italian summer. It was supposed that nothing less than an earthquake that would shake the seven hills could dis

turb the solid walls, but the tiny weeds of an Italian summer struck roots between them and tossed the huge blocks of granite into shapeless ruins. So must inevitably our ideas, the only living forces,

for a while overawed by marble and gold and iron and organization, heave all to ruin and rebuild on a finer model.

THE PURITAN PRINCIPLE AND JOHN

BROWN.

Delivered in Music Hall before the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society, December 18, 1859.

I

THANK God for John Calvin. To be sure, he burned

Servetus; but the Puritans, or at least their immediate descendants, hung the witches; George Washington held slaves; and wherever you go up and down history, you find men, not angels. Of course you find imperfect men, but you find great men; men who have marked their own age, and moulded the succeeding; men to whose might of ability, and to whose disinterested suffering for those about them, the succeeding generations owe the larger share of their blessings; men whose lips and lives God has made the channel through which his choicest gifts come to their fellow-beings. John Calvin was one of these, - perhaps the profoundest intellect of his day, certainly one of the largest statesmen of his generation. His was the statesman-like mind that organized Puritanism, that put ideas into the shape of institutions, and in that way organized victory, when, under Loyola, Catholicism, availing itself of the shrewdest and keenest machinery, made its reaction assault upon the new idea of the Protestant religion. If in that struggle, Western Europe came out victorious, we owe it more to the statesmanship of Calvin, than to the large German heart of Luther. We owe to Calvin at least,

it is not unfair to claim, nor improbable in the sequence of events to suppose that a large share of those most eminent and excellent characteristics of New England, which have made her what she is, and saved her for the future, came from the brain of John Calvin.

-

Luther's biography is to be read in books. The plodding patience of the German intellect has gathered up every trait and every trifle, the minutest, of his life, and you may read it spread out in loving admiration on a thousand pages of biography. Calvin's life is written in Scotland and New England, in the triumphs of the people against priestcraft and power. To him, more than to any other man, the Puritans owed republicanism, — the republicanism of the Church. The instinct of his day recognized that clearly, distinguishing this element of Calvinism. You see it in the wit of Charles II., when he said, "Calvinism is a religion unfit for a gentleman." It was unfit for a gentleman of that day, for it was a religion of the people. It recognized — first since the earliest centuries of Christianity that the heart of God beats through every human heart, and that when you mass up the millions, with their instinctive, fair-play sense of right, and their devotional impulses, you get nearer God's heart than from the second-hand scholarship and conservative tendency of what are called the thoughtful and educated classes. We owe this element, good or bad, to Calvinism.

Then, we owe to it a second element, marking the Puritans most largely, and that is action. The Puritan was not a man of speculation. He originated nothing. His principles are to be found broadcast in the centuries behind him. His speculations were all old. You might find them in the lectures of Abelard; you meet with them in the radicalism of Wat Tyler; you find them all over the continent of Europe. The distinction between